Readers of Melville cannot help but notice the conjunction of generic innovation, anthropological encounter, and theological quandary that characterizes his fiction. Yet when addressing themselves to the question of Melville and religion, critics have largely viewed these domains separately, agreeing that Melville's fiction is pervasively characterized by his battle, or “quarrel,” with a dying Christianity but that his interests in anthropological encounter and aesthetic experimentation are present because Christianity is absent or, at most, merely vestigial. At war with Christian theology and practice, his literature constitutes an antireligious domain of subversive indictment against a god who has failed man and whose absence has generated a modern voice of recrimination and alienation: “doth not Scripture intimate,” queries the narrator in Pierre, “that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand? - a Hollow, truly!” What is new in Melville is new because it is not religion.